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Sunday, April 14, 2013

The House of Rumour (New Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 448 pp.) is the
seventh and most ambitious novel by Jake Arnott, an English writer of what some
call “faction”–fiction constructed around real people and events, some famed,
others obscure. Engrossing as pure
story, the novel is also an education, as the broad outlines of World War II
and the ensuing half-century are reconfigured in and by the voices of people
whose split decisions nudged the levers of history, or whose visionary hunches
foretold its outcomes. The blurbs draw
comparisons with Jennifer Egan’s A Visit
from the Goon Squad (at the high end) and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (at the low); reading the novel, I thought of
Robert Anton Wilson (especially Masks of
the Illuminati, which germinates from similar principles), James Ellroy (American Tabloid, in its
interconnections and narrative density), Thomas Harris (canny prose
incorporating deep research into language, history, art, science), and David
Thomson (Suspectsand Silver Light, novels built from the secret parts of familiar,
albeit fictional, lives).

The House of Rumour begins and ends with Larry Zagorsky, a minor pulp science fiction writer living in Los Angeles just before Pearl Harbor, who joins the Mañana Literary Society, described as “the closest thing to a salon that science fiction had at that time.” The Society is unofficially chaired by future SF giant Robert Heinlein; among its members are Anthony Boucher, mystery writer and editor, and L. Ron Hubbard, another pulp workhorse, not yet the creator of Scientology. Also in the Society orbit is Jack Parsons, a charismatic genius researching solid fuel for the newly established Cal-Tech Jet Propulsion Labs –as well as a practitioner of ritual magic and priest of the Ordo Templi Orientis cult. Parsons, like the Mañana Literary Society, actually existed; and if, like me, you hadn't known that, you have plenty to discover as the novel veers back and forth in time, its speculative web drawing in wartime spy capers and UFOs, gender and sexuality, prophecy and the occult, how James Bond was created, and why Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland.

Often “conspiracy theory” amounts
to little more than asking what the connection might be between facts already
existing in close but unexamined proximity. Fact 1: In May 1941, for reasons
that are still far from clear, Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler’s deputy Führer,
piloted a plane from Berlin to Scotland, where
he crash-landed and was imprisoned for the remainder of the war. Fact 2: Four years earlier, a novel by Murray Constantine called Swastika Night, about the aftermath of
a Nazi invasion, was published in England;
in it, a top Hitler lieutenant named “von Hess” flies from Berlin
to Scotland
on a secret mission.

Jake Arnott. (Photo by Cristian Barnett)

The oddity of these facts in
relation to each other is Arnott’s point of departure: Hess becomes a character in The House of Rumour, as does Constantine. Among the other historical figures making
physical or referential contact with Arnott’s inventions are Jorge Luis Borges,
Aleister Crowley, Cyril Connolly, Hanna Reitsch (the Nazi Amelia Earhart),
Fidel Castro, and Jim Jones; among the other weird texts evoked are Boucher’s Rocket to the Morgue, Tommaso
Campanella’s The City of the Sun,
Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Time,
Douglas-Hamilton and Clydesdale’s The
Pilots’ Book of Everest, William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley, and John W. Campbell’s pulp periodical Astounding Science Fiction. Ferreting out unlikely confluence and
scintillating obscurity, Arnott fabricates a secret history with “no clear
linear narrative, merely quanta of information, free particles that fire off
one another . . . tales that split and converge.” One is tempted to read with the Internet
handy, to check the factuality of a name, event, or work that sounds too juicy
or prophetic to be true. Almost always,
it is true. (A warning, though: Save all such checks until the book is
finished, or you’ll ruin more than one surprise.)

Yet Arnott’s mesh of fantasy and
fact holds together as a novel. He makes
scenes live, both in their moments and as parts of a whole. He has no trouble slipping into his characters’
skins, transmitting empathically from their often lonesome, disturbed
interiors. His Ian Fleming is a
mesmerizing creation. As the MI5 agent
tasked with, among other things, investigating the Hess premonition, Fleming
also lives out a tormented dynamic with his never-named “other self . . . the
hollow man of his imagination”–he who will, after the war, emerge as James
Bond. This cold, deadly cipher, “the
empty hero of Fleming’s private narrative,” is the void into which Fleming can
deposit his own depths, themselves empty of any passion save masochism. More than brilliant, it is revelatory, even
moving, of Arnott to depict Bond as his creator’s tortured and torturing
doppelgänger, the cruel Quilty to Fleming’s suffering Humbert. (And upon meeting the aged diabolist Aleister
Crowley–England’s most notorious hedonist, tapped by MI5 for his insight into
Nazi occultism–Fleming finds the prototype of Le Chiffre, Blofeld,
Goldfinger: Bond’s fat, grinning
supervillains!)

Mysteries of sex, and of sexual
switching, feed the novel’s encompassing mysteries. A female character disappears, to reappear as
a man; a female writer takes a male identity. The devoted Hess is mockingly referred
to as Hitler’s “Empress,” but he wears the name proudly, coveting its “feminine
potency.” Jack Parsons
proclaims the female principle as the next human transformation, supplanting
what another character calls “the cult of the male that made fascism
possible.” The novel’s women are
not merely key players in male stories, but movers and shapers with agendas,
frustrations, drives, failures. Arnott’s
ability to imagine worlds within and without characters in markedly different
situations –the spy-infested streets of London; the midst of a black mass in the
California desert; the despair of Jonestown during the mass suicide; the heat
and hysteria of Havana leading up to the 1980 Mariel boat-lift, in which Castro
allowed thousands of Cubans to escape the island on makeshift sailing vessels,
knowing many of them would never reach Florida –gives breath and blood to what might
otherwise have been only a catalog of entertaining enigmas. The narrative mutates organically, its
circumference always expanding to draw in another character, another history,
another set of secrets; a common desire for flight humanizes and unites these
free particles of humanity as they fire off across eras, and their dreams of
transformation and transcendence multiply.

The House of Rumour is not Arnott’s first novel to appear in North
America, but it is the first to be partly set in the US, and likely the one that will
break his name among non-British readerships. He made that name in 1999 with The
Long Firm, a densely detailed crime epic set in the London underworld of the 1960s. Its centrifugal force is gangster Harry
Starks, lone wolf in rackets dominated by brother-gangs the Krays and the
Richardsons; its five sections have different narrators, with Starks–a
homosexual, manic depressive, and celebrity-besotted sentimentalist–seen
through their eyes across the decade’s radical span. Real figures (Judy Garland, Johnnie Ray, Jack
“The Hat” McVitie, the Krays themselves) are involved, not as name-checks but
as starkly detailed characters; and while its events, sounds, and sensations
gibe with popular notions of the English sixties and East
End crime, the novel carves out a convincing fictive space leagues
away from Austin Powers or Guy
Ritchie films. (The novel’s recreative
success, like that of Mad Men, lies
partly in what isn’t evoked; e.g.,
Joe Meek makes an appearance, but The Beatles aren’t mentioned.)

The Long Firm became a bestseller and BBC miniseries, thereby
spawning, where it perhaps needn’t have, a “Harry Starks trilogy”–and although
the closer, truecrime (2003),
improves considerably on the second installment, He Kills Coppers (2001), both have a plodding, dutiful quality, as
if Arnott were executing a brief rather than fulfilling a design. There were signs of regeneration in Johnny Come Home(2006), about political belief and personal betrayal in a 1972
London gripped by glam rock and terrorism, and The Devil’s Paintbrush (2009) upped the imaginative ante in several
respects –chiefly by leaving the womb of Mother London and the cultural
familiarities of the 1960s and ‘70s for Paris in 1903, to depict the historical
encounter of Aleister Crowley and British Army hero Sir Hector Macdonald.

That breakthrough now leads
logically, and happily, to The House of
Rumour, which covers roughly seventy years and encompasses, not just England and the
continent, but Earth and outer space. Where Arnott will venture next, I wouldn’t guess; but I hope he sticks
with his great theme, which is the power of secrets. “Imagine if we could unlock that,” Crowley muses in The Devil’s Paintbrush. “Unleash it.” The secret holds the same seduction offered by art, religion, science,
law–the promise of an answer. Despite
his narrator’s metaphor of free particles, Arnott doesn’t say that history is
the sum of random collisions, and therefore absurd, weightless. He says that history is weightier, less
random than we can know, because at innumerable decision points, great and
small–some minutely documented for posterity, most now dead with their
owners–another choice could have been made. Why a decision went as it did, why history
turned a certain way: That is the
secret. We can call these facts obvious,
and so dismiss them. But like any good
novel, The House of Rumour makes the
obvious problematic, the factual mysterious. It makes the question of what is real in our world feel like the biggest
secret of all.